Now that my site is running reasonably smoothly again we can finally get the photos I took LAST Friday during the Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival. Yeah, we are behind, let’s get started.

Friday night’s show started with a reunion of my favorite comedy show in New York City. The show has appeared on this site before, most notably when I covered their last three shows. But when I shot their 5th year reunion was also important because it happened to be the first time I had shot nightlife photography with an on camera flash. It was sort of the starting point for me taking event work slightly seriously.

I had to see Invite Them Up get back together if only for a night. The show is hosted by Bobby Tisdale and Eugene Mirman and features a number of comics inter spliced with weird chants and bits from Bobby with Eugene taking his 10 minutes towards the end of the show. Often times there is music.

Friday Bobby was in full swing playing out his infamous mic checking bit for longer than anyone reasonably should. Bobby is not a reasonable man. Bobby lead the crowd in a number of rousing chants, although he unfortunately left out any mention of Connie Chung or Margaret Thatcher, two ladies who get a lot of play in Bobbys chanting.

Bobby brought on SNL writer John Mulaney to open the show. John sat next to me on the plane to South by Southwest this year and we had a very awkward conversation where I accidentally talked shit about several projects he worked on. I don’t mean to not like SNL I just think most of the cast is annoying, and yeah I like Dimitri Martin live more than I like his show, but John is a funny fucking guy and had me laughing his whole set.

Next up was Morgan Murphy who I saw opening for Patton Oswalt and Eugene nearly for years ago. When I moved up to NYC she was opening for Neil Hamburger at Piano’s and tried to sneak me in to the sold out show. I have sort of have had a crush on her since then from a far, but now she lives in NYC so now I am probably going to run into her on the street and not make eye contact. I have seen her a few times and she was hilarious as always. She also did a bit of prop comedy with some Jewish New Year 5770 shades which were pretty epic. She told me she had been wearing them all day.

After Morgan was John Hodgman who I have never actually seen do stand up, but I am a big fan of. Considering half his bit was about how everyone recognizes him from his TV commercial you probably know him as the PC guy from the Mac Vs PC commercials. I ran into the Mac (Justin Long) at McDonald’s the other day, so now I have my bases covered. I personally am a fan of John from his work on This American Life and Boing Boing, two of the more nerdy things I have been obsessed with in my life. His roast of Obama was also pretty outstanding. It was good to get to see him do stand up.

Next was an Invite Them Up staple called 30 seconds of stand up where a comic does EXACTY 30 seconds of generally improvised stand up. The very funny Joe Mande stepped up and did his 30 seconds on Friday. He was then followed by Eugene who brought up Larry Murphy to help him do a bit involving Daniel Day-Lewis trying to figure out how to use a Blue Ray DVD player while staying in his There Will Be Blood character. This was all followed by John Westley Harding doing a few songs for a short musical break to the comedy.

Speaking of music, up next was Reggie Watts who makes the most insane music you have ever heard using only his voice and a Line 6. He was brilliant as always, but there is nothing really to say about it. You just need to see him for your self. Your mind will be blown. Even watching him on tape does not do him justice.

The headliner of the show was former Daily Show correspondent and American hating Red Coat John Oliver. I have seen him do stand up a half dozen times and while I am always near tears in laughter, I always leave with just a little more hatred towards the British. His humor is so elitist that he has figured a perfect way to make hipsters laugh by attacking Americans as a whole which hipsters feel a sense of superiority over. So when he makes fun of American’s for being ignorant gluttons the audience some how feels he isn’t actually making fun of them. I think it is brilliant and completely hilarious and had a real sense of pride when I explained that only Americans would create a hot dog eating contest, then get beaten in it and make it a statement of national honor to win it back. And as I hope you know by now, I am a HUGE Joey Chestnut fan. USA! USA!

It was a great show and I was glad to see Invite Them Up back if even only for a night. The room was too dark though and so the photos aren’t great.  They aren’t even as good as the pictures from the day before. That being said, stand up comedy photos aren’t exactly riveting, but I hope you guys check out all of these comedians and if you get another chance to see Invite Them Up you should get on that.

I also wanted to mention that there were four people in the show named John.  I had this idea for a long time to collect autographs of famous people named John as an art project.  I think once I moved to NYC and started being around celebrities a lot more the idea of asking anyone for an autograph seems super awkward even if it’s mostly for an art project. Still, when I saw John Hodgman and John Oliver talking outside, I probably should have added them to the collection/project. There is a pretty good explanation of the John autograph idea here if you want to know what the hell I am talking about.

Anyway, let’s move on.  I need to get some sleep. I have to cover an adult convention in NJ tomorrow which I am sure will be super weird.  I have this idea of turning my car into a photo booth and trying to convince porn stars to pose in it. Not sure if that will actually happen, but it sounds really funny to me right now.  So, please click here to see all the photos from the Invite Them Up reunion and I will talk to you guys when I get back.

The Yes Men are at it again. If you don’t know about them, you should. They are left wing pranksters who protest big corporations using some highly entertaining methods. I have a history with them, as you can read here, and heard about their newest prank and asked them if I could come down and shoot some photos. Other than their people, I was the only photographer on the scene for their test launch. Tomorrow they are launching hundreds these balls at the UN to address the climate week meetings*. Today they had a test run down in DUMBO and we gathered in the sun to watch it all go down. Tons of people gathered to watch, but most of them happened to be part of the wedding that was taking place at the exact same time on the exact same mini beach. It was pretty funny. I would love to see their wedding pictures.

Anyway, this is going to be an exciting week for hilarious radical activism so keep your eyes open, read the papers and check back here. I should have some interesting photos if I manage not to sleep through them.

Lastly, my gallery software is giving me fits right now so I uploaded the shots to Flickr. Hopefully they will be up on DBB soon. Click here to see all the pictures.

*hundreds may be a slight exaggeration.

Update: The picture link now goes to my site and not Flickr.

Listen, I spent like 5 hours wasting my life watching Matt Zaller interview celebrities. I seriously watched 60 of them until like 8am. Then I slept all day.  Now I have to go take photos and I don’t have time for a legit update, so let’s put all that wasted time to some use. Here are three of my favorite Matt Zaller interviews.  And let it be said that while he is no Nardwuar he can be pretty fucking funny. God damn.

PS. Every time I see her I fall slightly more in love with Aubrey Plaza.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcXRjjM02LQ&feature=channel[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbR8ixhuvQo&feature=channel[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GT90XiTHJCE&feature=channel[/youtube]

So Monday came and went without me being near a computer. That almost never happens, but I had a doctors appointment in the city and I never came back. I just wanted to do a quick update before I went to sleep and let you know a few things that are probably more Live Journal material than a super professional type blog of DBB’s stature, but unfortunately I don’t have a LJ.

Firstly about the doctors appointment. I got the results of the MRI on my knee. Turns out I have a torn meniscus. The meniscus is the cartilage in your knee that separates your bones so they don’t rub together. I have to get surgery and do rehab, but the good news is its only minor surgery. It only takes 15 minutes and I can walk out. The doctor told me I just have to rest it for a couple days and its pretty much healed in two weeks, with max six weeks of rehab.  Compare that to a year of rehab for an ACL tear and I will consider myself lucky.  The other good news is that in the mean time I can walk on it and I am not going to do any further damage to it. This means that I can go and shoot if I can suck up the pain.  And really the pain is not as bad as the super weird feeling of having your knee feel like it is going to fall apart at any minute. Knowing that my knee cap is not going to slip into my shin has been a big help and being able to put my full weight on it has reduced my significant limp into a pretty sweet pimp walk. Lets just hope I can get it together soon, because I have gained 8lbs since my injury stopped me from walking everywhere.

Next personal note is that I cut off all my hair. I had a dream that my mom cut off my mustache in my sleep and it freaked me out. I just woke up and decided to get a shave and a haircut. My friend Ibi did it and before she really went to work she cut it into a bob which is pretty fucking funny.  I will post a picture below. Let me know what you think of the new me.

Nextly I spent most of Sunday under my covers weeping loudly after my Miami Dolphins embarrassed themselves in a loss to the Atlanta Falcons.  They turned the ball over 4 fucking times and their offensive line played the worst game since they drafted the monster left tackle Jake Long. More successful that the Dolphins was the DolfansNYC the New York City Miami Dolphins Fan Club that I started with my friend Michelle. I have no friends who like football, so it has been really great for me to have a day a week where I can hang out with a bunch of Dolphins fans. I lost my voice from screaming so much.  You would think I was insane if you saw me wearing all aqua and screaming at a television for 3 hours. Even more insane that normal. We had almost 100 people show up and the NY Daily News mentioned our bar Third and Long as a place to go to watch Phins games. We had a raffle and raised over $100 for charity. It was a pretty successful party. Evidently I am a better promotor of sports bars than I am dance clubs. I just wish the Dolphins had won.

On a less personal note two more celebrities have passed on. Jim Carroll is now one of those people who died. and while nobody puts Baby in the corner, the cancer in Patrick Swazye put him 6 feet under.  I am a pretty big fan of Jim Carroll and I fucking loved Point Break dammit. Speaking of celebrities, Kanye West is making me hate that I really dug his first two albums and Jessica Simpson is pretty much the only person who could make a puppy dying funny to me.

Continuing on, this Joe Wilson shit has got to stop. Going after a republican for losing his shit during Obama’s health care speech is just divisive and republican tactics. Democrats should have just let it go. They guy looks like an asshole already, if you make this huge deal out of it, they are just going to make a huge deal out of the fact that one of your appointees is a 911 conspiracy theorist. Another story that has gotten out of hand his the Serena Williams melting down during the US Open. If you some how missed it, Serena told a line judge that she was going to shove a tennis ball up her ass after the judge had called a ticky tack fault a that put her one point away from losing her match. She then got penalized a point for flipping her wig and lost the match. People are talking about suspending her for it. Things like this happen all the time in football, baseball and basket ball and no one cares.  When McEnroe did it he got endorsements. I think a lot of the outrage is about her being a black woman in an almost entirely white sport. I saw message board posts calling her an animal and all manor of borderline racist shit. Fuck that. She owns part of the Dolphins now, so I got her back.

Anyway, I have no blind items for you today, but hopefully I will have pics up from the NY Couture Spring show up later. Until then enjoy these sexy photos of me during and after my hair cut.

The other day I shot the opening of Friday Jones tattoo shop for Inked Magazine.  These are the out takes.  Friday is the woman who gave Angelina Jolie her Billy Bob Thornton tattoo and now she has set up shop inside of the Senses NY salon on 5th Ave.  The idea is “tattoo couture” where you get a massage and cocktails while you get your tattoo done.  Personally, if I had it my way tattoos would only be given by giant scary men in creepy underground tattoo lairs, but if you are going to get a butterfly tattoo on your shoulder you might as well get a manicure while you are doing it.

The event featured a tattoo fashion show, free Hypnotiq drinks and a pretty decent gift bag as well as appearances by tattoo legend Lyle Tuttle and Danity Kane member Aubrey O’Day. Aubrey got her finger tattooed to start the party.  She also has a pretty cute dog who was kicking it at the party too.

You can check out all the shots by clicking here. 

PS. I was at Coney Island for the Siren Festival all day today and I took 2100 photos, so get ready for a weeks worth of band shots… Also the shots from the art party at McKibbin yesterday should be up tomorrow.  It was a pretty fucking nuts event, even if the photos I took sucked.

Show some swag on your skin and get your tattoo ideas inked.

So Michael Jackson died and fucked up my whole day so I went and wondered the streets of NYC listening to MJ blasting out cards. Then I decided to get a MJ tattoo for some reason. It just seemed like a good idea. I went over to Fine Line Tattoo on 1st and 1st and got my friends roommate Wylie to do it. It turned out pretty sick. My friend from the NY Post interviewed me about it and their photographer took some photos but I think it was too late for the paper. Alas.

After that I went over to Anchor Bar where The Fat Jew was bar tending and hung out for a while. I took pictures of him acting a fool and a bunch of the kids there. I didn’t really know any one else there but we made some friends. A lot of people took pictures of my MJ tattoo on their camera phones and we danced to every MJ song imaginable. Kid Cudi showed up which Fat Jew described as a “Twitter Connection” and they worked some ladies in hilarious tag team fashion.

Around 3AM I headed over to Lit to NC-17 to show of my tattoo and see some friends. The best part of Lit is that it is two floors, so if you played your cards right and went up and down the stairs enough, you didn’t even have to go 3 minutes without listening to MJ. It was pretty magical. I took a few more pictures there, but I was mostly just fucking around. This broken flash thing has gotten completely out of hand. It makes me not want to shoot at all, but I need to get something for the Village Voice this week… plus I promised the Fat Jew I would make an appearance. I tried to make due and ended up getting some interesting shots, but so many of them are fucking terrible and I just have to delete them.

Click here to see the photos from the saddest day since they made Sparks illegal.

No jokes. Michael Jackson to me is music. I was born in 1980. Thriller came out in 1982. When I was like 3 or 4 years old I got Thriller on vinyl because in preschool it was my favorite thing ever. I used to dance as a baby to Beat It. Off The Wall, Thriller and BAD are the three greatest debut albums of any artist in history. I don’t even care about how much of a weirdo he became, to me he is a legend.

I had planned two updates planned today but they will have to wait until tomorrow. I can’t do anything right now. The King of Pop is dead. Here are my top 5 all time favorite Michael Jackson songs. Although it is really hard to pick just 5.

1. Beat It – This was my first favorite song of all time. I once did a lip sync video to it while my friends had a knife fight.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uqxo1SKB0z8&feature=PlayList&p=E6A076CBACCA51C0&index=2[/youtube]

2. Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough – This is pretty much the theme song for my life. It should be for everyone’s life.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_hz2am90Hk&feature=channel_page[/youtube]

3. Billy Jean – No other song can get me dancing faster. I hear that beat, I go nuts.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En-cHBv7UpA&feature=PlayList&p=E6A076CBACCA51C0&index=4[/youtube]

4. Rock With You – This song is still being remade over and over again 30 years later. It is THE pop song.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AulpHEa3GwU[/youtube]

5. Dirty Diana – I have never met someone named Diana without this immediately being stuck in my head.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hg-IRZk4D0[/youtube]

And Bonus Hit:
ABC – The Jackson 5 have many many amazing songs to pick from, but there is no other song that kills it like ABC.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-16fDpOW948&feature=related[/youtube]

I have to make these two next updates pretty quick. I am mildly freaking out about leaving for LA. I have about 24 hours left before I have to leave for the air port and a huge amount of things to do.

Anyway, Andrea Grant is a pin up artist, poet and comic book author who is currently dating DJ VH1 who is probably one of my favorite nightlife peoples. He hired me to come shoot her event at Le Poisson Rouge. It was a pretty tame event until about 1030 when people started getting drunk and dancing. Even Macaulay Culkin showed up at the end of the night which was supremely weird. Seemed like a nice guy though. Andrea gave a super intense reading and that was pretty amazing, but over all it was just folks enjoying conversation and drinks. I had some pretty good conversations… It was a nice night. I am pretty stressed out right now, so it was nice for me not to have to run around getting bumped into and running over couches to get shots.

Anyway, Andrea’s book is a collection of pin up style shots of her matching poems she has written. You can check her site out here, her book here and her comic book here.

And then after all that, check out the pictures from yesterday evening here.

I am a huge David Carridine fan.  I have read his books, seen his movies and the only movie poster up in my house is for Deathrace 2000 which as far as I am concerned is one of the greatest films of all time. He is best known as Kain in Kung Fu, which I have never actually gotten that into.  I was introduce to him though his work on films such as Deathrace, Cannon Ball and the film Bound For Glory where he played a reasonably violent Woody Guthrie.  When he was tapped to play Bill in Kill Bill I could not have been more excited.  I thought he was fantastic, and his published diaries from working on that film are incredible.  It is one of the best books on behind the scenes film work I have ever read… and about 50% of the books I read are about film.

Carradine was found dead hanging in a hotel room in Bangkok today.  I cringed when I saw the news. I can’t imagine why he would have taken  his own life.  After reading his books, you get the idea he would not be the type of person to do something like that, especially with the late rebirth of his career.  According to IMDB he has 6 films in post production right now.  I hate to think of what might have happened to him or what could  have made him kill himself.

He was an amazing actor and will be dearly missed.  Enjoy these video clips below.  This will be my only post today in honor o his passing.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdWF7kd1tNo[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J7T1mzD8nc[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTypzOJfuAY[/youtube]